The Knockoff Economy approaches the question of incentives and innovation in a wholly new way–by exploring creative fields where copying is generally legal, such as fashion, food, and even professional football. By uncovering these important but rarely studied industries, Raustiala and Sprigman reveal a nuanced and fascinating relationship between imitation and innovation. In some creative fields, copying is kept in check through informal industry norms enforced by private sanctions. In others, the freedom to copy actually promotes creativity. High fashion gave rise to the very term “knockoff,” yet the freedom to imitate great designs only makes the fashion cycle run faster–and forces the fashion industry to be even more creative.

Raustiala and Sprigman carry their analysis from food to font design to football plays to finance, examining how and why each of these vibrant industries remains innovative even when imitation is common. There is an important thread that ties all these instances together–successful creative industries can evolve to the point where they become inoculated against–and even profit from–a world of free and easy copying. And there are important lessons here for copyright-focused industries, like music and film, that have struggled as digital technologies have made copying increasingly widespread and difficult to stop.

…

By looking where few had looked before–at markets that fall outside normal IP law–The Knockoff Economy opens up fascinating creative worlds. And it demonstrates that not only is a great deal of innovation possible without intellectual property, but that intellectual property’s absence is sometimes better for innovation.

The sudden collapse of oil prices poses a challenge to inflation targeting central banks in oil exporting economies. This paper illustrates that challenge and conducts a quantitative assessment of the impact of permanent changes in oil prices in a small and open economy, in which oil represents an important fraction of its exports. We calibrate and estimate a variety of real and monetary dynamic stochastic general equilibrium models using Colombian historical data. We find that, in these artificial economies the macroeconomic effects can be large but vary depending on the structure of the economy. The main channels through which the shock passes to the economy come from the increased country risk premium, the real exchange rate depreciation, the sectoral reallocation of resources from nontradables to tradables and the sluggish adjustment of prices. Contrary to the conventional findings in the literature of the financial accelerator mechanism for single-good closed economies, in multiple-goods small open economies the financial accelerator does not play a significant role in magnifying macroeconomic fluctuations. The sectoral reallocation from nontradable to tradables diminishes the financial amplification mechanism.

Relacionado.Economic History and Economic Development: New Economic History in Retrospect and Prospect

Abstract.

I argue in this paper for more interaction between economic history and economic development. Both subfields study economic development; the difference is that economic history focuses on high-wage countries while economic development focuses on low-wage economies. My argument is based on recent research by Robert Allen, Joachim Voth and their colleagues. Voth demonstrated that Western Europe became a high-wage economy in the 14th century, using the European Marriage Pattern stimulated by the effects of the Black Death. This created economic conditions that led eventually to the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century. Allen found that the Industrial Revolution resulted from high wages and low power costs. He showed that the technology of industrialization was adapted to these factor prices and is not profitable in low-wage economies. The cross-over to economic development suggests that demography affects destiny now as in the past, and that lessons from economic history can inform current policy decisions. This argument is framed by a description of the origins of the New Economic History, also known as Cliometrics, and a non-random survey of recent research emphasizing the emerging methodology of the New Economic History.

The poor performance of regional trade in Latin America is a long-lasting story as its historical roots are currently on the international debates. Liberalization efforts since the nineties have not been enough to strongly promote regional integration. Some authors argue that more attention should be paid to alternative obstacles, such as poor investment in regional transport infrastructures (Mesquita Moreira, Volpe, Blyde, & Martincus Volpe, 2008). We offer a new insight to this debate from an extraordinary period of regional trade, that of 1910-1950. Regional trade in the Southern Cone of Latin America experienced an increase during the World Wars, especially important in the second case (Carreras-Marín et al., 2013). In this paper we explore the drivers behind this phenomenon. Following (Jacks et al., 2010, 2011) we have estimated relative trade costs for a sample of South American countries (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, and Peru) within them and for them with their main trade partners outside the region. Our regression results provide a hint as to why Latin American persistently traded less than would be expected after controlling for obvious geographic barriers to trade. We infer that high prices, low productivity and potentially low quality kept intra-Latin American trade at low levels. However, relative trade costs were probably quite high too. During the wars intra-Latin American absolute trade barriers may or may not have changed substantively but relative trade costs did seem to have changed. Rises in market share were due to the opportunities available when European producers were off-line. This suggests that Latin American exports could compete in other Latin American markets if external conditions allowed. Both increased regional integration via policy and attempts to build industry might have allowed for further industrial growth in Latin America prior to 1950.

An approach to this question from textiles, it indicates that during First World War the main substitution was focused to the domestic market. However, in Second World War a modest substitution of foreign importation caused an increase of exports to neighbors. Nevertheless such an increase was not persistent, once the war finished. Again, relative trade costs and third countries competition seem to be the clues. Next step into this research should be to investigate the role played by a set of factors behind trade costs.

Terms and conditions: 1. Any commenter of this blog agrees to transfer the copy right of his comments to the blogger. 2. RSS readers and / or aggregators that captures the content of this blog (posts or comments) are forbidden. These actions will be subject to the DMCA notice-and-takedown rules and will be legally pursued by the proprietor of the blog. Cancelar respuesta